UPDATE, September 27, 2024: Fixed some details. Also, here is a longish piece by Josh Collinsworth that covers the whole sorry affair in detail. The only thing missing is Mullenweg's announcement to give WP Engine a four-day "reprieve", written in the same churlish tone as everything else he's put out recently. I would not invite this guy to your next birthday party.
It seems that a dispute has erupted between WordPress and WP Engine, a company that makes use of WordPress in ways that the WordPress founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg apparently does not like. There are cease and desist letters, lawyers and all that involved now.
This has led to a couple of unusual entries in the normally quiet WordPress Events and News section of my blog’s dashboard, as seen below.
Clicking the links (you can’t click them in the image, sorry!) will lead to the WP founder saying mean things about WP Engine, even calling it a “cancer.” He had threatened to bad mouth WP Engine at a major public WP event (ironically sponsored in part by WP Engine) if WP engine didn’t share some of their sweet lucre with him through some vaguely defined licensing something-or-other that Matt appeared to have invented very recently. WP Engine asked for more time, Matt took that as no and the bad-mouthing took place). It’s ugly all around.
And what this person–the CEO and founder of WordPress–has done has made people start to question the actions of WordPress as an organization, and how much it can be trusted moving forward. It takes a long time to build a good reputation, but only moments to ruin one.
I was already revisiting my (ever)quest to move my blogging, and this is…helping. I’m not sure if that’s the outcome Matt Mullenweg was looking for.
